Folk tales begin in darkness: Snakes unfurl themselves in the endless night before the sun is born. Children stumble through a black forest to a witch’s cottage. A starving match girl tries to warm herself in the deepening dusk. Too Many Souls blends the gaunt poetry of Avi C. Engel’s lyrics with some of the structure of folk music, and the result is haunting and elegiac.
‘Hold This Flame’ starts the album with soft, repetitive tones; not quite a drone, it’s hypnotic, tugging the listener into the album, creating a dream state that will inform the rest of the auditory experience. “hold this flame”, Engel intones. “fold this wave / make me wait”.
There are echoes of folk tales all over the album, from the title of ‘Ladybird, What’s Wrong?’ to the Hansel-and-Gretel breadcrumbs of ‘Breadcrumb Dance’ to the grave imagining of ‘Wooly Mammoth’. Engel is unsparing with their lyrics: ‘Ladybird’ starts “one by one I watch them piss into the sun / saying ooh I win / now follow me”. But when they declaim “golden calves and bleeding hearts / potter’s fields and missions to mars / blessed or cursed, what a mess we’ve made”, they’re not just listing modern miseries; they are declaring their intention “to misbehave”. Gentle as these soft songs appear, there’s an undercurrent of intent; we believe them.
Engel’s textured voice wraps around these eclectic folk songs, beguiling, devotional, and warm as cardamom. Their use of detuned guitar and arcing, bowed gudok lend the music an Eastern European flavor. In ‘The Oven Bird’s Song’, harmonies drape themselves across this structure so shimmeringly that we almost miss the vivid lyrical content: “I’ve excavated all that I can / felt the emerald pulse on the riverbed/ the oven bird’s song I’ll never understand / as buds break on the flesh of the burning branch”. Wrapping around in rhythmic cycles in track after track, the music draws the listener deeper and deeper in; we are made witnesses both to the darker aspects of human impact and to the beauty of the natural world, sometimes in shocking simultaneity. In ‘Wooly Mammoth’, Engel reminds us that “way up in the firmament of heaven / homeless stars are making up their beds / some of them are dead and some of them are living / some are floating somewhere in between”.
Too Many Souls makes its way like a soft, shambling creature, not quite formed, through the subconscious. If there’s a criticism to make here, it’s that the pieces are a little too shapeless and evenly paced, with only slight dynamic and density shifts through each track. As such, it is a perfect album to half-listen to, almost ambient, almost a dream; with closer attention, a listener might wish for more variation. But against that steady backdrop, small sounds gain impact: witness the spacey tones that crawl into the last half-minute of ‘Without Any Eyes’.
The album closes with a striking cover of the folk standard ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, the gudok etching the melody over an oddly comforting backdrop of reverse-gated notes. All in all, Too Many Souls is mesmerising and otherworldly, existing somewhere in the dream state between memory and prophecy: a visit there will leave the listener quietly transformed.
